Interactive Forum of political culture

December 1, 2017December 1, 2017

Money is for control

Money now equals debt, and debt equals control. Do you not think you are in debt if you have money? Take a dollar out of your wallet right now and have a look at the bill. At the very top, in big block letters it reads “FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE.” A note, dear reader, is a debt. Do you think that it means the government owes you $1 or $5 worth of gold or silver? Surely not, although it used to. Possessing that bank note means you are being controlled.

Bob Livingston for the Bob Livingston Letter

It began 50 years ago — the year after I started publishing The Bob Livingston Letter — with the Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act (the Bank Secrecy Act) which was supposed to stop “criminal” activity. It made financial institutions report to the government on any transactions involving substantial sums of money. Even private transactions between American citizens.

Isn’t it interesting that these laws with such impressively important names — the Bank Secrecy Act, the Patriot Act — always purport to stop the bad guys, yet end up being used against the people?

Not just Americans. These laws have infected every financial institution around the world. I used to recommend Swiss Annuities as vehicles for privacy and investment. Now I can’t because they are not private.

How did the money creators bamboozle even the Swiss, the guardians of private banking for 250 years?

“Money as a System of Control,” is a speech, available on YouTube, by Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a technologist, bitcoin expert and serial entrepreneur. It is an excellent explanation of how the government began to use money to control the population.

Mr. Antonopoulos explains it all very well in his talk. Here are the most relevant remarks:

In 1970, Richard Nixon signed the bank secrecy act and turned money into a system of control.

A system of control that attempts to use money as a political tool in order to control who is able to send and receive it, who they are able to send money to, and aims for the complete surveillance of all financial transactions worldwide.

In 1970, Richard Nixon deputized the financial services field and turned it into a branch of law enforcement beyond borders, beyond jurisdiction, beyond due process, beyond political control, beyond recourse.

There are tiers of access and control within the financial system. Some people who have better access, better recourse and some people who have complete immunity. Some can commit crimes against millions — robo-foreclosures, LIBOR fraud, rigging the gold markets — and no one will ever go to jail.

Why? Because when money becomes a system of control, financial services companies become deputies in the system and get some perks. One is that they never go to jail, with a few exceptions — as long as you never break a fundamental rule of society. Bernie Madoff went to jail because he made the fundamental mistake of stealing from rich people. Foreclose on 10 million poor people? No problem. Create 3.5 million fake bank accounts at Wells Fargo? No problem. Lose 143 million private records at Equifax? How many executives will go to jail? None.

Because a system of control corrupts the basis of money until it can no longer function as a medium of exchange and breeds exclusion. Entire countries are being cut off from financial access. You don’t act in the best interests of the U.S., you lose your SWIFT code. You are no longer part of the wire transfer network. You must submit to the universal jurisdiction of American courts, like Switzerland had to do, or you lose access to international banking and the reserve currency.

Money does not flow freely.

You can’t store value in a currency that can be confiscated at whim, frozen by any cop or banker at any time. That’s not a stable store of value. You can’t use it as your currency reserve or exchange reserve to buy oil if you’re a country because if you cross the superpowers they will cut off your access and you will not be able to use oil. You can’t use money as a medium of exchange if you can’t exchange it freely with whomever you want.

Gradually, the corruption spreads. The banks now play cop for the worlds superpowers. They’re stuck in their gilded cage, offering economic services to a tiny fraction of the human population, sacrificing 4 billion people on the altar of poverty in order to create a nice fake bourgeois sense of security among the middle class by selling them lies.

The FDIC: “Don’t worry, your money is insured.” How many Greeks had insurance on their bank accounts? All of them. What happened to that? Poof! In one afternoon, vanished.

You don’t “have money in a bank.” It’s not your money. You have an account, which is a legal construct that they give you in exchange for an unsecured loan of your money so that they can finance credit to their customers. You don’t own the money in your account. You have a construct that maybe entitles you to withdraw at the pace they want. Unless you associate with the wrong people, go to the wrong protest, vote for the wrong party. This is every dictator’s dream because it ensures political dissent can be snuffed out at the bank very effectively.

In case you don’t believe Mr. Antonopoulos, recall that in the late night hours, congress recently passed a rule that protects Equifax, credit-card companies, banks and other financial institutions from being sued via class action by customers who feel they’ve been wronged or harmed.

So you see, money supersedes political party. It is now outside the law, as is also evident with the current state of civil asset forfeiture and “cop shopping.”

The only way the dollar — or any currency that replaces it — will lose the power of control is if a currency exists outside of the corruption of the state and government.

Gold and silver have always been rare and precious to humans, and they have the quality of a store of value and medium of exchange built in, which is why they will always be of use as money. Yes, the government always seeks to control everything around these non-central bank currencies, tries to confiscate them and often attempts to rig the market for them. But gold and silver themselves can’t be corrupted, so they are ideal as stores of value.

Will bitcoin, or some other cryptocurrency, take hold as a medium of exchange?

You should now also be aware of why the Chinese government is so adamant about making its currency, the yuan, legitimate on the world stage. Not because the Chinese wish economic viability. They have that already. No, the communist government craves money’s new function as a system of law enforcement, surveillance and controlling the people.

This is why the Chinese people are piling into bitcoin. They desperately want to get away from government control of them through the yuan, the dollar, or any other central bank money.

Bitcoins, the most popular crypto-currency, live in their own world that makes them half commodity, like gold, and half currency. They’re mined like gold and there’s a limited number of them, just like there’s a limited amount of gold.

Unlike a commodity, there is a market for them where they are traded and used as currency. And it isn’t backed by a nation.

Of course governments are finding ways to regulate even bitcoin, and it’s not as anonymous as once thought. And the financial industry is already looking for ways to “financialize” bitcoin, with ETF offerings, so that you can “invest” your fake money in fake paper that purports to track the ups and downs of the crypto-currency.

I still believe in gold. I always will. But I am also for any currency that enables freedom of trade and a free economy. That is obviously not the dollar, although you need to hold some cash as long as the U.S. is still a world power. The dollar is there to control you, through debt, restrictions and surveillance, as you have just read. I am truly sorry if this makes you feel less free, but it’s up to you to protect yourself and your loved ones. The government does not wish to do it for you. On the contrary… as the recent senate vote shows, they are working against you.